Friday, January 6, 2012

Problems Solved

The aforesaid problems have solutions and these solutions lie in the idea of moderation. If for instance, the intellectual does not want to become a fanatic, he must moderate his zeal for truth, and the same holds for the other personalities.
This solution however seems to shed light on morality itself and what it means to be "moderate". Moderation is not just the mean between two extremes but it is primarily the degree that one holds a personality trait, such that following it doesn't lead one to betray that personality. And here it is important to say that "betray" means "logically contradict"; for all morality is reasonable, so if an action is unreasonable, then neither can it be moral.
It may be advanced as a theorem of praexology that no one wants to betray their personality. I suppose that this may be proved by the fact that the personality is often confounded with that which the person values most; a sexual man is called sensual, and such. However, it often happens that a personality can be betrayed, so that "no one wants to betray their personality" is not a mere tautology. Usually, it appears that some value, which is necessary for other values, has all or the lion's share of the personality imputed to it since it is a means that is useful for attaining the end or "that which the person values most". In this instance, it is the this former value which receives the name of "personality" and gives it its name; the love of freedom makes a man value power and therefore is he named "a freedom lover", or a man who lets the love of logic lead him to a certain philosophy is more a lover of logic than a lover of philosophy. The rule that "no one wants to betray their own personality" is especially applicable to this construction of "personality".And praxeologically, this construction is the most convenient since it is stated in terms of the means-ends framework of the science of action.
So I believe that it is as evident that people don't want to betray their personalities as it is to say that people don't want to to have the cost of their means increased; no one wants the value of their tractors or capital inflated if they want to make use of them -the market abhors a spread between the future and present value of a good and it abhors it even more when this spread is increased. Similarly so when the personality is betrayed. Therefore, the same law that makes a necessary rise in interest rates painful and an unnecessary rise in the same unbearable, also guarantees that a personality trait that leads to its own betrayal and downfall is no trait worth keeping (ceteris paribus).
And this leads to the final implication, that moderating a personality means to find a trait that most easily serves your highest values.